The first time Felix sparked a tin on purpose, nothing happened at all.
"Again," said Ambrose.
We were at our table by the infirmary window, the three of us in a row, with the afternoon coming in gold across the cots and the infirmary mistress at the far end of the room pretending, very hard, to roll bandages. She'd let us bring Felix on one condition, which she'd stated to the headmistress, to me, and to the wall behind me, in that order.
"Not on my cots."
Then, after a moment's thought, looking at Felix's hands: "Not my floor."
The tin sat between us. Hana's, with the dent in the lid. I'd poured a splash of 「Heal」 into the water, a plain White circle no bigger than my palm, and Ambrose had laid his hands on either side of the tin and held the water still, the way he does, until it set clear and firm and faintly green. Then Felix had reached out with one finger, very carefully, the way you'd reach for a cat you weren't sure about, and touched it.
Nothing. Not a crackle. Not a thread of white.
"Sorry," said Felix. "It's strange doing it on purpose. Usually it just happens."
"When you're excited," I said.
"Exactly." He flexed his fingers. "So I'll be excited."
He touched the tin again, grinning, and a spark jumped from his fingertip so hard the lid rattled. The gel went cloudy, like a pond after someone's stepped in it, and the faint green light inside it flickered and went out.
We all looked at it.
"Dead," said Ambrose, and wrote it down.
That was the first afternoon. Every tin is counted and every tin comes back, the headmistress had said, so I counted. Eleven tins. Two did nothing. Four went cloudy and dead. Three came out fizzing so hard that when Ambrose tested one on his thumb, he said "Stings," in a voice I'd never heard him use, and put his thumb in his mouth. Two were right.
Two out of eleven.
It was Felix's hands. I worked that out by the third afternoon, watching him. When he was laughing, when Marika had sent another letter about General or Ambrose had said something with only one word in it, his spark came out small and steady, and the gel took it the way bread takes butter. When he went quiet, the spark went wrong. Too much, or nothing. Once, halfway through the fourth afternoon, a first-year was carried in from the battle yard with a split lip, and her mother came in behind her, scolding and frightened, holding her hand. Felix watched them. He didn't stop smiling. He reached for the next tin, and a spark snapped off his finger before he'd touched it, and the tin jumped half an inch on the table.
"Sorry," said Felix. "Excited."
Nobody said anything. Ambrose wrote Dead in the notebook, and drew a small line under it.
By the end of the first week, Felix was getting it right more than he was getting it wrong. And the tins he got right didn't turn to water at midnight.
They lasted the next day. And the next.
On the third morning, Ambrose came to my door at dawn again, with the tin in his hand and his notebook under his arm. The gel had gone soft at the edges, like butter left out, and the threads of white in it were slow and faint, but it still had its green circle. He cut his thumb before I could stop him. It healed. Slowly, and prickly, but it healed.
On the fourth morning, it was water.
Spark, Ambrose wrote. Three days. Prickly. Yes.
I showed Felix the page at breakfast. He read it, and then read it again, and then he put his finger on Three and kept it there, as though he could hold it down.
"Three days," he said.
"It was a day, before," I said. "Less. It was midnight."
"No, it's wonderful. Three days is wonderful."
He was smiling. His lips moved, very slightly, the way mine do when I count. I don't think he knew he was doing it.
I was watching his lips. I read the word as he said it to himself.
Thirty.
"Can it be drunk?" said Felix.
It was the end of the second week. He asked it the way he asks most things, lightly, leaning back in his chair with a tin in his hand. But he'd stopped turning the tin. He'd been holding it still for a while.
"Tried," said Ambrose. "First. Failed."
Felix's chair came down onto all four legs.
It was true. Before there was any gel, there'd been a cup. That was where we'd started, weeks before the garden: a cup of water and a splash of 「Heal」, and Ambrose holding it still. It had worked for about as long as he held it. The moment he let go, the water moved, and the healing ran out of it the way water runs out between your fingers. Every time. We'd tried a jug, a bowl, a flask with a stopper. We'd tried Ambrose holding it longer. In the end Ambrose had stopped trying to make the water stay still and started making it into something that couldn't move. That was the gel.
I told Felix all of that. Ambrose added "Spilled," twice, at the right places.
Felix listened without a single joke. When I'd finished, he looked at the tin in his hand for a long moment.
"Did you try it with me?" he said.
Ambrose looked at him. Then at me. Then, slowly, he closed his notebook, which is the closest Ambrose comes to standing up and shouting.
The infirmary mistress had a stack of tin cups for the patients. Ambrose borrowed one without asking. She saw him do it and said, "Not my cups," and he gave her a look of such deep, sincere apology that she went back to her bandages and pretended she hadn't said anything.
Water. A splash of 「Heal」, a White circle, small and plain. Ambrose's hands on either side of the cup, holding it still. The faint green light settled inside it, as quiet as a fish at the bottom of a pond.
"Gently," I said to Felix.
"I'm always gentle."
"You made a lid jump half an inch."
"That was enthusiasm."
He put the tip of one finger on the surface of the water.
For a moment, nothing. Then a thread of white light ran down from his finger into the cup, and broke into a hundred smaller threads, and all of them began to rise.
Bubbles. Tiny ones, at first, coming up from the bottom of the cup in thin silver lines, and then more of them, and then the whole cup was fizzing very softly, with a sound like rain heard from inside a house. The green light didn't sink to the bottom and lie there. It turned, slowly, round and round, carried up and down by the bubbles, as if it were being stirred.
Ambrose took his hands away.
The water moved. It fizzed and turned and slopped against the side of the cup. And the green light stayed in it.
Nobody said anything.
Then Ambrose took out his penknife.
"Please stop—" I started.
He'd already cut his thumb. He picked up the cup in his other hand, looked into it with deep scientific seriousness, and drank the whole thing in one go.
We watched him.
Ambrose stood very still. His eyes went slightly wide. Then, with no change at all in his expression, he burped. Small, but unmistakable.
Felix made a noise like a kettle.
Ambrose held up his thumb. The thread of yellow in his light faded, slower than under my hand, a little faster than with the gel, and the cut closed into a thin pink line.
He sat down, opened his notebook, and wrote, very neatly:
Cup. Spark. Drunk. Works.
Then, underneath, after a moment's thought:
Prickly. Inside.
Felix was laughing so hard he had to put his head down on the table. I was laughing too. Even the infirmary mistress, at the far end of the room, had stopped pretending to roll bandages and was standing with one hand pressed to her mouth.
"What did it taste like?" I asked, when I could.
Ambrose considered it.
"Cider," he said. "Young."
I knew what he meant. In Greymark, at the end of autumn, when the new cider hasn't finished working yet, it fizzes on your tongue and up your nose, and Marika always drinks too much of it too fast and sneezes for an hour.
We made a second cup and watched it. It fizzed for most of the afternoon. As long as it fizzed, the green light turned inside it. Then, a little before the supper bell, the bubbles slowed, and thinned, and stopped. The water lay still and flat. And the green light was gone with them.
Ambrose wrote: Flat: water.
Then: Next: fizz. Longer.
Felix had stopped laughing a while before that. He sat with his chin on his folded arms, watching the flat cup, and he wasn't smiling. Not unhappy. Just not smiling, the way a person doesn't, when they've forgotten anyone is there to see.
He was looking at that cup the way you'd look at the only door in a very long wall.
Then he glanced up and saw one of his escorts watching him from the doorway, and his face smoothed over, quick as a hand passing across water.
"Cider," he said brightly. "Young. That's going in a song."
Naomi spoke in my chest that evening, before supper, which isn't when Naomi speaks. Naomi's rule is talk after supper. Naomi doesn't break her own rules.
(Fabian.)
(Here.)
(A rider came from Greymark this afternoon. A letter from Sigrid.)
I stopped on the path. Liesel stopped beside me, because she'd heard it too. Wren stopped a pace behind us both, because we had, and looked at our faces, and said nothing.
(The monsters?) I said.
(No.) A pause. (Riders. On the forest road, the long one that skirts the edge of the Gloamwood. Twenty, maybe more. Dark armor. No banner. They turned back when our patrol rode out to meet them.)
(Bellonian,) said Marika. Not loudly. That was the worst part. Marika saying anything quietly.
(Sigrid thinks so.)
The long road around the edge of the Gloamwood. I knew it, because I'd heard it described at a supper table, by someone laughing about the dust.
Felix had come that way. A month ago, with his carriage gray to the windows.
(It could be nothing,) said Hana. (It could be a patrol of their own. Or merchants. Merchants wear dark—)
(Merchants carry banners,) said Naomi.
Nobody said anything to that.
(I should be on that road,) said Marika.
I waited for Naomi to say No. She says no to Marika about most things; she's been saying it since before I was born.
(...Yes,) said Naomi.
Liesel's hand found mine on the path. The ring was warm between our fingers.
(Big Sis,) I said. (Should I tell Felix?)
The bond went quiet for a long time.
(No,) said Naomi at last. (Not yet. Not until we know what it is.) Another pause. (Not because I think it's him.)
(Then why?)
(Because if it's what I think it is,) said Naomi, (he'll find out soon enough. Let him have his cider until then.)
I hadn't told her about the cider. I'd told her about the cup, and the fizz, and Ambrose. I suppose Liesel had told her the rest. Or Naomi had simply known. With Naomi, it's hard to tell the difference.
(Quiet now,) said Naomi. (Supper. Then talk. Then drain.)
She was keeping her own rules again. I don't know why that frightened me more than the letter.
I counted my pool that night the way I always do, sitting on the edge of my bed with the door shut and the lamp turned low.
Twenty-four. The same as yesterday. It doesn't grow every night. It grows when it grows.
Through the wall, Liesel's candle was settling, the way it does when she's on the edge of sleep: flicker, flicker, then steady. Upstairs, Felix's bath was running. I lay back against the pillow and listened to the water, and waited for the singing to start, and thought about cups.
I think I'd known, since the balcony, what Felix's someone a month's ride from here meant. Their Queen is unwell, I'm told. A son doesn't cross a forest to sit in another kingdom's classroom for no reason. A son who asks Only midnight? in that voice, and counts to thirty under his breath, and looks at a cup of fizzing water as if it were a door.
I'm a healer. I know what I can do, and what I can't.
White 「Cure」 clears a fever. A mild one. Anything serious, anything that's been in the body long enough to settle, comes back. Green cleared a Broodmother's venom, and a boy's nine-day fever, and I'd been proud of that. But a sickness that keeps a queen in her bed for months, that her physicians can't name, that her son crossed a border to find an answer for?
I didn't think Green would be enough. I'd been not thinking it, very carefully, for a week.
I held my hand over my own chest, the way I do every night, and reached for the pitcher.
「Heal」, poured as high as I could pour it, the way I do every night to drain faster.
The circle opened under my palm.
It was blue.
I stopped breathing.
Not green. I'd reached for the top of what I had, the way I have every night since Greymark, and the top wasn't where it had been. It was like climbing stairs in the dark and finding one more step than you'd counted. Blue, threaded through with light, wider than my hand, turning slowly over my chest with its edges bright.
The exact blue of the sky over the inner wall, just before sunset. The blue of a ribbon. The blue in a braid on a spear in the next room.
I let it close. My heart was going like a drum.
Through the wall, Liesel's candle flared.
"...Fabian?"
Sleepy. Through eight feet of stone and plaster.
"Stairs," I said.
There was a pause. Then, very drowsily, from the other side of the wall: "There aren't any stairs in your bedroom."
"...No."
Another pause. I heard her turn over. Her candle flickered, and flickered, and settled again, low and steady.
"Tell me in the morning," said Liesel, mostly asleep. "Answer me after."
I sat up in the dark and looked at my hand.
I didn't open the circle again. I wanted to, very badly. I wanted to open it ten more times and make sure. But the board in every hall says what it says, and the Crown knows I'm Green, and there were a great many things I would have to find out before morning, starting with what else had changed.
I counted it instead. The way I count everything twice when it matters.
I'd reached for the top step, and there'd been another one.
Upstairs, the singing started. Loud, and cheerful, and terrible: the song about the miller's three daughters, which has eleven verses and no tune.
I lay back down and listened to all eleven, and for the first time since he'd arrived, I wondered what he was singing over.